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AstroCappella: Cosmic Radio Show

The Electromagnetic Spectrum: The Visible and Beyond

The human eye is sensitive to radiation with wavelengths ranging from 4 x
10-5 cm to 7 x 10-5 cm (0.00004 - 0.00007 cm or
4000 - 7000 Angstroms). We perceive this radiation
as visible light, from blue (the shortest wavelength) to red (the longest
wavelength). This is also the wavelength region where the Sun emits most
of its electromagnetic energy.

Our eyes are insensitive to electromagnetic radiation whose wavelength is
shorter than 4x10-5 cm (Ultraviolet, X-rays and Gamma rays),
and longer than 7x10-5 cm (Infrared, Microwave and Radio).
While this radiation is invisible to us, we have experience with it in our
day-to-day lives: doctors use X-rays to take pictures of the bones in our
bodies; we use microwave ovens to cook with, and infrared goggles to give
us "night vision"; Ultraviolet light from the Sun is responsible for some
pretty uncomfortable sunburns if we don't wear our sunscreen. Even though
our experience with low frequency radiation such as radio waves or
microwaves is dramatically different from our experience with X-rays, all
electromagnetic radiation is fundamentally the same. All electromagnetic
radiation travels at the speed of light.

Radio Astronomy

Electromagnetic radiation is composed of photons, which act in some ways
like a wave (they have a wavelength and a frequency) and in other ways
like a particle (atoms absorb and emit single photons with specific
energies). Radio radiation is made up of low energy photons. The energy
of a photon is directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation, so
radio waves have low frequency. Frequency and wavelength are inversely
proportional: the lower the frequency the longer the wavelength. Your
radio receives a signal with a wavelength about as long as a large
building (10, 000 centimeters or 1 MegaHertz) when you tune in an AM
station.

ALL objects emit electromagnetic radiation! This radiation is spread over
some region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The energy of any object
peaks at a wavelength which is dependent on the temperature of the object.
Cooler objects emit most of their energy at lower energies, while the
hottest objects emit most of their energy at the highest frequencies. The
Sun emits most of its energy in the visible portion of the spectrum, as do
all objects with similar temperatures (6000 degrees Kelvin). The Earth's
atmosphere lets in visible light, but effectively blocks much of the
harmful higher energy radiation, and much of the infrared. The atmosphere
allows radio waves to pass through it and reach the surface of the Earth.
Still, it wasn't until the 1950s that astronomers began to seriously study
the universe at radio wavelengths.

In astronomy, the only way we obtain information about objects in the sky
is by collecting and studying the electromagnetic radiation they emit.
Until someone thought of looking at the sky in a new way, by collecting
radio waves from it, no one knew if or how objects emitted radio waves.

In 1931, a researcher at Bell Labs, Karl Jansky, was interested in finding
the source of shortwave radio interference. This noise affected
long-range radio communications. The purpose of this project was
practical: how could radio communications be improved with a better
understanding of this noise? But what he discovered as a result of
building a special radio detector, and taking measurements that spanned
years, would profoundly affect our picture of the universe.
Jansky found no source on Earth for the constant hiss, but he did notice
that the time at which this noise was strongest was four minutes earlier
from one day to the next. He knew that stars in the sky also rise four
minutes earlier each day. This is known as a sidereal day. By linking the
peak of the noise to the rising times of stars in the sky, Jansky thought
a celestial source must be responsible for the hiss. He eventually
realized the radio waves came from the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
It took about 10 years from the time of Jansky's discovery for astronomers
to understand that interstellar gas would emit observable radio radiation.
Once this was known, the idea of studying the universe in the radio was
born. With Jansky's accidental discovery of a cosmic source of radio
waves, our view of the Universe suddenly grew, from the relatively limited
visible window into the radio.

How Radio Waves are Measured

Astronomers collect radio waves with radio "dishes" which are based on the
same principles as optical telescopes. A parabolic surface (the primary
mirror in an optical telescope) focuses the radiation it receives at a
point where an antenna is placed. The antenna absorbs radio waves and
transmits them to a signal amplifier. After the signal is amplified it is
recorded by either a tape recorder or a computer. Since radio waves are
long, the surface of a radio telescope does not need to be extremely
smooth in order to focus them. (This is often the major problem in
optical astronomy, and keeps the size of mirrors limited by our ability to
accurately polish the surface).

Radio telescopes are often quite large. The largest, Arecebo, in Puerto
Rico, is a radio observatory built right into a hillside, and is about 300
meters across. Because of its size it can detect long wavelength radio
waves. Radio waves are detectable day and night, since the Sun is not a
very strong source of radio waves when it is up during the day. Radio
waves are longer than raindrops and snowflakes, and many pass right
through storm clouds to be detected on Earth even during the murkiest days
and nights.

An early technical difficulty of radio astronomy was resolution. Since
radio waves are so long, it is difficult to accurately determine where in
the sky they come from. Only with very large dishes could accurate
position measurements be made. A clever way around this obstacle is to
combine observations of a single object taken at the same time at two or
more radio dishes. This is called interferometry. The effect is that
the resolving power increases as if the dish were the diameter of the
separation of the dishes. The further apart the dishes are, the higher
the resolution. With the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) in which
telescopes spanning the continental US, Alaska, and Hawaii observe
together, we can achieve resolution about 100 times better than the best
optical telescope in space (HST).

Some sources in the sky give off lots of visible radiation and lots of
radio. Others give off mostly one or the other. Very "loud" radio
sources may not have a bright optical counterpart, thus studying the
sky in the radio has introduced us to new sources in the sky, invisible
to the naked eye.

Sources of Cosmic Radio Waves

Just what *was* giving off all that radio noise that Karl Jansky observed
with his detectors? As radio telescopes and observing methods allowed for
more detailed observations, this source of radio waves was constantly
studied. It was found that the source was smaller than the orbit of
Jupiter -- a very small size when you consider the vastness of the Milky
Way Galaxy. Also, the source of the radio waves seemed to be nearly
stationary, indicating that it was very massive. It gave off tremendous
power. In fact, we now know that the source of Jansky's radio hiss is
mostly likely a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way
galaxy.

Distant galaxies are also sometimes relatively strong sources of radio
waves. Because of what we know about the source of radio waves at the
center of the Milky Way, we can speculate that these "radio loud" galaxies
also harbor supermassive black holes at their centers. Material falling
into the black hole is accelerated to such a high speed that it gives off
intense radio radiation. (This is known as synchrotron radiation.)

Most of the matter in the Milky Way is cool hydrogen gas. Because it is
cool it gives off no visible radiation. It is composed of hydrogen atoms,
which in turn are composed of one proton in the nucleus, with one electron
in orbit about it. Protons and electrons can be thought of as spinning
like a top, with one main difference. The proton and electron in a
hydrogen atom can spin in only two opposite directions. They either
align, so both spin in the same direction, or they spin each in the
opposite direction from the other. This slight difference in the
orientation of the two subatomic particles has a very slight difference in
energy. When an electron in a hydrogen atom "flips" its spin from the
higher to the lower energy state, it emits a very low energy photon with a
wavelength of 21 centimeters.

Cool clouds of gas are located in the galaxy very near star-forming regions.
In fact, it is these clouds of hydrogen that compress to form stars, so we
expect to find cool hydrogen near areas where stars are forming. Stars are
constantly forming in the spiral arms of our galaxy. Gas and dust between
the stars absorbs much of the visible radiation, but 21 cm radiation passes
through gas and dust virtually undisturbed. This means that we can see
much further out into the Milky Way when we look at radio wavelengths.

Astronomers can look out into the sky in any given direction, and detect
many clouds of cool hydrogen emitting 21 centimeter radiation. By measuring
the Doppler shift of the 21 cm line, the speeds of these clouds can be
measured. By combining radio observations of the 21 cm radiation from
many different directions, a map of the spiral structure of our galaxy can
be formed. This is one way that our picture of the Milky Way, and our place
in it, is determined from our position within the galaxy.

The first observations of pulsars, neutron stars with high magnetic fields,
spinning rapidly and firing off high energy radiation, were made in the radio.
When electrons are accelerated to very high speeds, which occurs near the
intense magnetic fields in pulsars, they give off lots of radio waves. The
discovery of pulsars proved the theoretical prediction of very dense objects
resulting from the death of massive stars.

In the 1960's a very important observation was made, again at Bell Labs,
that would have a profound effect on our interpretation about the birth of
the Universe. Penzias and Wilson, again searching for the source of noise
that had no known origin, discovered that the universe as a whole was
emitting weak microwave radiation in every direction! In other words,
even empty space is radiating, with a temperature of about 3 degrees above
absolute zero. Earlier theorists had predicted that if the universe
started out much hotter and was expanding as the result of an initial
explosion, the fingerprints of that event would be a very low temperature
radiation in all directions of the sky. The COsmic Background Explorer
(COBE) was launched in 1989 to take detailed measurements of this
radiation, and we have learned much about the universe and the Earth from
COBE's results. The spectrum of the universe is just as predicted by a
Big Bang beginning, with a temperature of 2.74 degrees. By studying the
slight variations from perfect homogeneous distribution, we can accurately
measure our speed and direction in the universe (we are racing toward the
Virgo cluster). On an even smaller scale, the seeds of formation of
galaxies are also evident in this radiation.

There truly is a Universe in the Radio, one which we have only very recently
begun to observe and understand. By observing the sky in the radio, we gain
new insight into the galaxy, discover new objects like pulsars, "see" the
invisible clouds of cool hydrogen, watch the violent turbulence at the centers
of distant galaxies, and uncover a mind-bending piece of information about
the beginning of the universe. In this century the Cosmic Radio Show has
just begun. It is an exciting and amazing time to be alive, watching as
the plot continues to unfold.